


The Burning Times

by TrivialPursuit



Category: Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them (Movies), Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling, Salem Witch Trials - Fandom
Genre: American History, American Witches, Gen, History, Immigration & Emigration, MACUSA | Magical Congress of the United States of America, Miss Robichaux's Academy for Exceptional Young Ladies, Salem Witch Trials, Salem Witches' Institute, Transgenerational Trauma, Witchcraft, cultural trauma, ilvermorny school of witchcraft and wizardry
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-20
Updated: 2017-12-20
Packaged: 2019-02-17 07:06:46
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,170
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13071690
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TrivialPursuit/pseuds/TrivialPursuit
Summary: OR the Salem Witches' Institute: seven things to know before you go.





	The Burning Times

**Author's Note:**

> I'm aware that JKR has officially said that the Salem Witches' Institute is modelled on the Women's Institute and no, I don't care.

The first thing you must know about the Salem Witches' Institute is that the blood is old and the magic is older.

The second thing that you should know is the unlike all other magical schools, the Institute resides in a white colonial on a street lined with oak trees in the heart of old Salem. This urbanity, above all else, defines her students. A devilish black wrought-iron fence and some of the state's oldest trees are all that protect her students from their neighbour's prying gaze. When she was first built, over three hundred years ago, the house was blue. However, fire damage necessitated the building being painted white.

(The best way to hide is in plain sight.)

This is the third thing you must know: in the front hall of the school there are three fire pits, each with a tall wooden stake protruding from the centre. The fires within the pits are always lit. But the fires are not enchanted to be everlasting; there is no witchcraft in their flames. Instead they are fed by a massive woodpile and tended by students and staff. None of the witches at Salem were burned, but nobody ever let the truth get in the way of a well made point.

(The lesson: this is what they will do to you if you are caught.)

Aside from this silent memorial, the Institute is utterly without commemoration. Plaques do not declare long-dead winners of school prizes, nor do photographs of past classes wave merrily from their black-and-white worlds. Student records are locked up tightly and punishment for attempting to see them is harsh. The only knowledge of past students is that which is passed on by word of mouth. Some say Theodosia Burr won the school’s arithmancy prize every year she attended, that Zelda Sayre had been a powerful seer who went mad, or Norma Mortenson had been the most brilliant potioneer the school had ever seen. Nobody knows for sure.

(Remember: You must always hide what you are.)

_A history lesson: America has no Minister for Magic. After a group of men stood around a table and wrote a declaration of war, then tried to form a country out of the ashes of that war, after all that, another group of men, this one smaller and less full of self-righteous fury then the first, stand around a table and ask what should be done. These men are not powerless, indeed they could be considered some of the most powerful men in this newly birthed republic. They are not powerful men in the old country, being third or fourth sons unlikely to inherited much more than a few thousand galleons and a courtesy title they will not be able to pass down to their children. Perhaps this is why they liked this new land, because in it they had power. They are not without options and they should not feel as helpless as they do._

_The choice before them is simple; to create a parallel government to look after their interests, or to place themselves under the rule of this new muggle government, one that does not know they exist and would burn them if they did, reaffirming the idea that all men, be he magical or muggle, is equal._

_These men consider themselves Paragons of Virtue and Modernity; they are men of the Enlightenment who champion these progressive values. Their glorious nation, bound together by bonds stronger than any forged of magic will succeed where all others have failed. This is their hope. To consider anything else is impossible._

_As the men stand around a table, a group of women sit around a fire, needles clicking in front of them. They are a small group, smaller than the men; they have yet to fully recover from the Trials and fear has made them wary just as it has made men idealists._   _These women also consider the fate of their kind, but in more pragmatic terms. They are not idealists and so they see the dangers when the men see only possibility. But these women know the damage that can be cause by one foolish little girl and so they must protect themselves and their daughters from harm._

_At schools like Hogwarts, old schools with a proud history and high walls, the founders are celebrated, revered, remembered. But in this new world, a world that does not have a place ready-made for them, a world that would incinerate villages for fear of them, they must fold themselves away into the shadows. The founders of the Institute are simply The Founders; all other identity has been hidden. All other identity is irrelevant._

The fourth thing: America is a melting pot. Give her your tired, your poor, your huddles masses and and she will forge them anew, washing away the past in favour of a glorious future. This applies to wizards just as much as anyone else. But the tired, poor huddled masses need to be taught magic by someone.

The largest school for magic in America is Ilvermorny. There used to be others. As more wizards and witches come, bringing their magics and traditions more schools are founded. But first there are the slaves, teaching their children about walking through dreams and speaking to the ancestors around fires in the dead of night by the elders of villages that they had previously warred with. The Irish teach magic by coal stoves in filthy tenements, children huddled around a blind old granny, her fingers shaking and gnarled. The Russians teach their children how to keep their deaths in eggs and chant their spells in old Slavonic. Everyone comes and everyone brings their magics, establishing schools to teach their young, but Salem is the first. Most of these schools eventually get absorbed into the melting pot; why teach your children the magics of the old world when they live in the new?

Miss Robichaux’s, in New Orleans, resists being shuttered in the aftermath of the Civil War despite attempts by the newly formed Magical Congress to send all of its students to Ilvermorny and leave nothing but a smoking ash heap as a warning to the next generation of southern witches from following the actions of their forefathers. Instead Robichaux's limps on, receiving fewer and fewer students every year, as the southern bloodlines get thinner and the magic gets weaker, a relic of the Old South which refuses to admit defeat. Only the oldest families, the proudest, the purest, send their daughters to Robichaux's anymore, their numbers dwindling every year. There were many schools, but Salem is the last one standing.

(The lesson: They can only kill you if you let them.)

Something left out of the history books: the wizarding community of the New World does not intervene in Salem, considering the possibility of detection to be too great. This is unprecedented. In Europe, witches were saved by themselves or magical bystanders, but with all the attention surrounding Salem, nobody is willing to risk themselves to save the innocent. Nor do the neighbouring magical or non-magical communities attempt to stop the insanity.

 _‘Nobody will help our girls when they are in trouble, and so we must teach them to help themselves.’_ A founder says, looking over the girls who comprise the first class, scarcely more than five, though even that is a blessing, considering how many parents were unwilling to let their daughters leave the protection of the family. Even more will never even understand what they are; the eighteenth century will be the age of American Obscurials.

The fifth thing: Salem does not want your boys. ' _Men_ ,' the founders declared, sitting around the fire with their needles clicking in front of them, _'are fools and putting our trust in them shall be our undoing. They do not hold our interests equal and so we will not trust them to teach our daughters what they need to know._ '

'We will teach them what they need to know to live not only among wizards but among men.' Another founder says, switching the colour of her wool. ' _We will teach them how to curtsy, speak the modern languages, embroider and cook. And we will teach them to turn men to frogs, make diamonds fall from a maiden's mouth, draw the future from a cup of tea, and how to protect against fire.'_

(Something to remember: a Salem girl is not only a witch, she is a _lady_.)

_A note to historians: Salem is a secretive school, even within the community. It is impossible to find without an invitation from the headmistress and nobody who is not a student has ever received one. No President has ever darkened the school’s doors. (No Salem girl has ever darkened the Magical Congress’s door either, though if one’s sat in the Capitol is anyone’s guess; the only people who know aren’t telling.)_

_Ilvermorny laughs at Salem, calls the school paranoid for all the secrecy and fear. ‘Reactionaries, the lot of them,’ one headmaster says, ‘Those crazy broads are scared of their own shadows.’_

_But Ilvermorny is a young school, unscarred by fear and fire, founded in good years of generosity and plenty. Ilvermorny has never watched its students die a hundred feet from its door, powerless to do anything. Ilvermorny was not founded on the bones of innocents dead in its name. Ilvermorny sits atop its mountain, safe from the world. Ilvermorny has a very short memory._

_Seraphina Picquery, for her part, tried to shut Salem down just once. ‘Your secrecy, your fear,’ she says, in a letter that is received and read despite not being addressed, ‘has no place as the wizarding world works towards peace with the non-magical community. All you do is perpetuate antiquated beliefs about the non-magical people in this country in which we all live while encouraging your students not to participate in the magical world. This letter is to demand that you to turn over your enrolment records and inform all students that they will be transferred to the Ilvermorny School of Witchcraft and Wizardry for the remainder of their education.’_

_Seraphina Picquery resigns the next day._

A sixth thing: Salem takes its history much more seriously than the other schools.

‘The majority of the victims of witch trials and inquisitions have always been helpless and innocent no-majs who became victims of an ignorant authority attempting to combat forces they had no hope of understanding. Witches, on the rare occasion a real one was caught, were most often saved through either their own magical intervention or that of a friend in the crowd, frequently with the application of a flame-freezing charm or, in the instances that drowning was the preferred test, a bubble-head charm. One of the most notable examples, taken perhaps to extremes, is that of Wendelin the Weird, who enjoyed the sensation of being burnt so much that she went to the stake forty-seven times.

‘This eccentricity, humourous though it may be, should not be used as a shield by the magical community against the horrors of the witch hunts, as well as the indifference shown by the magical community to those innocents who were punished in our place. Do not think we should feel proud that no-majs killed each other when administering their brutal justice while our community usually escaped unscathed.’ Dr Bishop, the History of Magic teacher, flicks her frizzy blonde hair nervously, folding her long and bony fingers around the corners of the lectern and staring down at her students grimly. ‘Just because you have a wand does not make you immortal. You are still made of flesh and bone and burn just as well as any no-maj.'

(Despite the distrust, Salem girls are the only students of any magical school to never break the Statue of Secrecy.)

A seventh thing: Salem is prepared for Voldemort, just as it had been prepared for Grindelwald before him. They had been readying themselves to weather his storm before young Tom Riddle was a twinkle in his mother’s eye. Salem is the only school that does not lose a single student to the wars, not because Salem girls do not fight, but because they have always seen the darkness and are not surprised when it rears its head once more.

Miss Good, the headmistress, stares down at her students over her half-moon glasses, her voice made thin and papery by the thick white scar that encircles her neck like a string of pearls, her ancient hands, mottled and twisted with burn scars clasped in front of her as if she were announcing a garden party rather than what will most definitely be an equally devastating repeat of events twenty years ago. Her students, practically identical in their pleated black wool skirts and white blouses, the black bows at their throats looking less like nooses than the neckties favoured by other schools, look back at her, apprehension write large on their faces.

‘Fear,’ Miss Good reminds her students, ‘makes monsters of us all.’

**Author's Note:**

> I began writing this before Fantastic Beasts came out, so it's sort of a weird muddle of head canon which I developed pre-movie and actual canon.  
> In my head canon, which probably has nothing to do with real canon, but whatever, MACUSA was created as a response to the circumstances in the wizarding community's participation in the Civil War and the realization that the magical community cannot expect the no-maj government to police a community they aren't even aware of. I also integrated other American witches and witchcraft communities from other fandoms, since I don't see them as necessarily being at odds with the Harry Potter universe.  
> Although I touched on several areas of the Harry Potter world that I'm interested in and think haven't been fully explored, I was mostly focused on the question of the impact of the Salem Witch Trials on the American witch community, as well as a school that prepares its students to participate in muggle culture rather than training them for the isolated magical community.  
> I'm not American and I don't specialize in American history, so if you notice any historical inaccuracies, please feel free to point them out in the comments.


End file.
